IBM CAMPUS – Stuttgart-Vaihingen

A methodical photographic survey of IBM Germany's former campus outside Stuttgart, one of the country's most celebrated postwar corporate complexes, photographed empty after nearly forty years of continuous use.

Designed by Egon Eiermann, among the most influential architects of postwar German modernism, the Stuttgart-Vaihingen campus served as IBM's German headquarters from 1972 until 2009. Andreas Gehrke's 23 photographs move across the site's glass pavilions, entrance canopy, and interior office floors, cataloging fittings, signage, and furniture left behind in a building still structurally intact but stripped of its original purpose. Drittel Books published the work as a numbered edition of 300 with a foreword by Christine Dissmann and design by Katrin Oeding, the second title in the publisher's trilogy on dormant West German corporate modernism.

Andreas Gehrke, a Berlin-based photographer and the founder of Drittel Books, has consistently photographed architecture in the interval between use and demolition or renovation. IBM Campus sits alongside his companion volumes on the former Der Spiegel towers in Hamburg and the Quelle Versand headquarters in Nuremberg, together forming a survey of the vacated infrastructure of West Germany's postwar economic institutions.